> This is why Tesla is valued higher than GM, Daimler or pretty much any other car company. Tesla at it's heart is a battery company with products built around that.
It was Samsung, not Tesla, who supplied the actual cells [1]: Tesla’s giant new Powerpack project in Australia will use battery cells made by Samsung
I believe it (the Tesla battery plant) was built as a joint venture with Panasonic giving the IP and tooling and Tesla operating the plant. They're using a custom cell format also, away from the ubiquitous and standard 18650.
LG, Panasonic and Samsung make almost all the lithium ion cells used today so it doesn't seem odd that Tesla would license one of their technologies to start. The r&d savings would be in the billions.
I haven’t been able to find a clear quote in print, but a year-old article in Vox [1] reads:
> “Musk has been the visionary,” said Steve LeVine, a journalist at Axios who has written a book about the battery industry. “He has been willing to take the plunge all the way along, from the very beginning.” In contrast, he told me in a phone interview, “Detroit has approached this race so cautiously.”
I remember hearing Musk being quite adamant the scale of the factory was for batteries, but you have to understand, he can’t really publicly say that he’s leveraging Panasonic for now, but will drop them as soon as he can.
Everything that he has been saying lately implies that they won't drop them. They may add other suppliers (especially for the factory in China), but they will likely always rely on suppliers for the cells themselves. I can't really think of a good reason for this to change.
After all, they are by far the world's largest consumer of batteries. They have leverage.
The touchscreen was done elsewhere, by someone else. Seriously, it was presented as a product to several phone companies and did not draw them in. The key to the first IPhone was the interface and form factor.
Ballmer was famously quoted in an interview laughing at it claiming it wouldn't appeal to customers due to not having a keyboard.
Hell, back in the 40's even Thomas Watson of IBM claimed there was only enough market for 5 computers in the world.
Many times it is a different style of how standard business operates so someone coming in and changing the market is really hard to look at when your mind is already made up.
Tesla provides a 10 year warranty for their stationary energy storage systems. I have seen a bunch of articles claiming that Tesla projects a ~15 year lifespan but have yet to find any actual statement from Tesla. Ultimately lithium ion lifespan is hugely dependent on temperature, depth of discharge, and number of charge cycles so there is potentially a lot of variance depending on use case and local climate.
It depends on many variables, namely depth of discharge, cycle count, speed of discharge and the same for charge.
If you bring your lipo cell from 80 to 60% and back slowly you can get an order of magnitude more cycles. This lends itself well to solar storage scenarios where you want to level out the production and can plan around how and when it will charge and discharge.
With my limited understanding of the Australian energy market, the system 'saved' $40M across the Australian energy market, it didn't generate $40M in income for the system operators.
ie by being a fast peaker supply, it stopped spikes in energy prices across the Aust Energy market which is where the savings of $40M come from.
If you consider Australia as a whole, did it save anything? That is, did it simply save the Australian state of South Australia $40 million they would have spent on the spot market, but entirely at the expense of other entities in the Australian market that would have otherwise sold it the electricity?
Not that there is anything wrong with that - it still makes total sense for SA to deploy such a system in that case, but it's very different than say saving $40 million in fuel costs due to not spinning up short-term natgas generators or something.
Short version: the Australian energy market is a mess and was being gamed by a small (2 or 3) number of operators of gas peaking plants who were driving the spot price up to several orders of magnitude higher than normal wholesale prices. The battery by simply existing cut the ability of these operators to game the market as heavily, because they could only bid up to the floor price the state government had set for the battery to bid in at.
This is direct state interference in a competitive market so the “floor” is still quite high. With more private operators entering the market the ability to game the system will be eroded further since everyone wants to get the easy money.
The savings were mostly due to cutting the fat out of the market gouging practices. No/little change to actual supply occurred.
Your point is valid, the 40M would have went elsewhere in the market. I still think it's arguably better to not be wasting fuel and contributing pollution, and that preventing the disproportionate flow of money from utility consumers to operators is a side benefit... but that's debatable and a very socialist opinion.
There's nothing socialist about squeezing inefficiencies out of a market. It's what well functioning markets are for, after all. From what I understand the Australian energy market is a long way from well functioning, with a few small players holding the system to ransom.
Socialism would be hitting those guys with a big regulatory stick, or shutting them down for just providing a service. Not all state expenditure is socialist. Were monarchies involving heavy state domination of the economy socialist? No, and neither necessarily are liberal democracies with a state sector, especially if that state sector is exposed to market forces.
It's really annoying that so many mentions of socialism or capitalism on HN get the basics wrong. These terms have perfectly good established meanings that are actually quite specific.
The only inefficiency is that they're burning a consumable to provide the electricity during peak. The rest (likely a good part of the that 40M) is going back into the economy in one way or another (construction of the peaking plants, operators margins, jobs, suppliers of consumables, taxes on consumables, taxes on profits, etc) - provided that those funds don't leave the country it should be very near to a net neutral cash flow for the local economy, only that the battery keeps more in the consumers pockets vs the utilities', hence my socialist comment - moving money from corporations to consumers. If you consider that the energy for the battery ultimately comes from the same grid, and that grid is not entirely renewable, then it's power in all probability also consumed some fuels (70% of Australia's power comes from coal I think).
So: Australia is sunny and it's consumption peaks generally follow the temperature due to air conditioning - so build more solar and pair it with more storage (batteries) instead of investing in coal and gas burning.
> hence my socialist comment - moving money from corporations to consumers.
Thats is such a bizarre comment. No corporation has a right to make money, they have to earn it by providing a valuable service. If that service can be provided more efficiently another way, tough. That's what market forces are all about.
Yes the energy company commissioning the battery is publicly owned. You could squint and see some socialism in that. I've no argument there. However it's doing this because it is exposed to market forces, and overspending on peak power provision. Characterising responding to that market stimulus with capital investment is I think going a step too far.
Look at it another way. Is exposing public companies to market forces and having them react to those stimuli more socialist than protecting them from markets, or less socialist? Is it closer to pure capitalism or further away?
South Australia's energy grid is a very exceptional case, due to a very jarring transition to renewables. I would not expect the same level of returns in other areas.
None of the problems in the SA grid have been due to renewables.
The problems have been interconnects failing, poorly maintained transmission lines failing, the market operator placing restrictions on renewables which meant that renewables were not allowed to try to keep the lights on, and reliance of SA on electricity imported from unreliable interstate supply (aka coal thermal plants that break down or simply fail due to high ambient temperatures).
All of SA’s energy problems are due to poor regulation, poor market operation, poor maintenance, Federal interference, market gaming by fossil fuel operators, and unreliable coal plants.
There will be similar returns possible for other batteries in NSW (a net importer, thus highly vulnerable to gaming of the market) and QLD with a large installed base of unreliable coal which means increasing need for ancillary services.
Coal is not reliable to start with, and the plant currently in use is old and getting to the point of being no longer economically viable. NSW and QLD grids will need significant support services as they transition from unreliable coal to dependable (but intermittent) renewables.
It's worth noting that the major recent failures of the grid across south-eastern Australia have been due to 1) tornados taking down the interconnector between Victoria and SA (a failure which the conservative government blamed on renewables), and 2) regular failures from the decrepit old coal power plants.
While the transition to renewables has indeed been rapid and jarring, that's not what has caused problems.
Failure of a meshed power system cannot be attributed to the failure of any single sub-system. Rather it must be a combination of factors including those you just mentioned.
The dependence of the power system on renewables (specifically wind farms)contributed in two ways to the blackout:
1. The majority of wind turbines provide little or no system inertia. By displacing synchronous generation with wind generation, system inertia is reduced which results in greater ROCOF during an event where there is a change in active power demand/supply. In the SA blackout, fast ROCOF overwhelmed the system's last line of defence- under frequency load shedding.
2. Some wind turbines contained a fault ride-through setting which AEMO was apparently not aware of prior to the blackout. Specifically, the setting caused the turbines to disconnect after experiencing a sequence of voltage excursions within a set time period. The disconnection caused a loss of active power supply to the grid which contributed to the drop in frequency and eventual collapse.
I think bmon just meant that renewables have more daily peaks than coal or nuclear, so they create more opportunities for battery savings relative to traditional fast start generation.
More peaks doesn't mean worse all things considered, it isn't a critique, it's just saying that battery viability is highly contingent on local power mix.
I don't have any specific wear numbers, but a system like this is going to be designed for maximum lifespan not for limited cases where you want every possible drop of energy that can be put into or out of the battery. I suspect that the cells are never charged above about 75-80% of capacity and probably are never discharged below 20-30% of capacity. Avoiding both extremes should greatly extend the number of available cycles from hundreds to thousands or more.
”but a system like this is going to be designed for maximum lifespan”
I don’t know what this system was designed for, but a product that costs $66M and saves $40M in its first year need not be designed for a long lifespan.
It seems scrapping this after 3 years still would net you a nice profit margin.
So, depending on how much designing for a long lifespan costs, that may be a thing of the past.
AFAIK these things can be recycled with relative ease. I wonder at which point it would make sense to include a small battery recycling plant with large installations like this. "Cell XYZ is damaged, remove, replace and recycle"
3000 cycles “lifespan” but most of the degradation happens in the first couple of years with the rate of degradation about 3% a year, capacity still remains and the product will still have significant capacity in 20 years.
As opposed to say a synchronous converter which requires annual downtime and continual replacement of parts, and (being limited by inertia) can’t provide the same stability and support that a battery can.
The payback period is ~18 months so lasting less than 10 years is mostly irrelevant.
On top of that these systems are still useful well below their original capacity, so they can rather than a sudden huge bill you simply add more capacity as the original battery’s degrade in a fairly predictable fashion. Over time you end up with a much smaller annual investment than your saving every year.
Payback is a prerequisite to people to actually buying your less earth sucking technology so while it might not be the end goal it's a goal nonetheless.
Battery University ( https://batteryuniversity.com/ ) has a wealth of knowledge on this subject. LiIon cells are quite temperamental, especially when it comes to extreme climates as it turns out.
There are externalities to lithium ion battery production. Lithium is a finite resource and the environmental impact needs to be considered as well. Its shortsighted to only consider cost.
While this is true, these battery solutions tend to offset the much larger externalities of the fossil-fuel based technologies they help make redundant.
The li-ion externalities is mostly incurred once when mining. Although it's still in it's infancy, recycling li-ion batteries is already possible, and supposedly profitable. Especially when you can get an enormous batch of cells of exactly the same model as you would with this project.
The biggest problem in recycling li-ion batteries is that you may need different processes for different cells, so you need to sort them first.
Actually, this has changed since the price of lithium increased 300% since 2014. Australia now has operating lithium mines, and there are mines in construction in portugal too.
There is significantly more extractable lithium than needed at any rational forseen rate of ramp-up. The impact of mining has to be borne by all real goods which depend on mines, not just this one.
You are adopting implied reductionism around the "cost" side without having done the work (in my opinion) to justify that this concern outweighs the upside benefits of ceasing to use coal.
PS a lot of the minable lithium which isn't in Chile, is in Australia. So, we have low-miles lithium!
There's some interesting politics going on wrt lithium in Chile. Seems like the regulators don't want to increase output as lithium extraction uses a ton of water, and the Atacama is one of the driest places on Earth.
Presumably that is why the same company is trying to kick off in Australia as well, even though we have higher regulatory and labour costs here.
It was Samsung, not Tesla, who supplied the actual cells [1]: Tesla’s giant new Powerpack project in Australia will use battery cells made by Samsung
[1] https://electrek.co/2017/08/09/tesla-powerpack-project-austr...